Star Trek Lives! (convention)

Convention
Name:	Star Trek Lives! (convention), also known simply as the "Star Trek Con," or "FebCon," or the "Committee Cons" (while Al Schuster was part of the Committee, called the "International Star Trek Convention"). The phrase "Star Trek Lives!" was used by other conventions as well.
Dates:	1972-1976
Frequency:	annual
Location:	New York
Type:	fan-run
Focus:	Star Trek
Organization:	checks for the 1975 con were to be made out to "Star Trek Associates"
Founder:	From the 1973 program book: Joan Winston & Elyse Pines/Elyse Rosenstein (Other members included Allan Asherman, Eileen Becker, Steve Rosenstein, Dana Anderson, Thom Anderson, Renee Bodner, Stu Hellinger, Devra Langsam, Deborah Langsam, Eileen Becker, Maureen Wilson, Joyce Yasner and Al Schuster) aka The Committee (Star Trek). In later years: Barbara Wenk, Wendy Lindboe, Louise Sachter, Stuart Grossman, Claire Eddy, Diane Duane and David Simmons served on the Committee.
Founding Date:
URL:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

first page of a 4-page flyer advertising the 1972 convention

George Takei, Joan Winston (in blue shirt), sitting on Jeff Maynard’s lap; "Patia von Sternberg" (professional name), last row, 4th from the left, Toni Lay, last row 5th from the left; Elyse Pines (Rosenstein), front row, 2nd from the left with the red ribbon badge; and many unidentified fans.

Star Trek Lives! was a early and influential series of Star Trek conventions held in New York in 1972-1976.

These cons were created by "a small group of die-hard fans who were tired of being ignored and/or patronized at the regular science fiction conventions and decided to have one of their own. The rest is history."

The first convention was held January 21-23, 1972 at the Statler Hilton and featured guests (Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement and D.C. Fontana), an art show, a costume call, NASA space displays (moon rocks and an astronaut suit), and a hospitality room. Episodes were also screened from 16mm prints, including the original pilot The Cage and a blooper reel. Devra Langsam, a member of The Committee wrote about this con extensively in Star Trek Convention, or, how I spent my vacation, or What would I have done for aggravation if I hadn't been helping run a convention?.

The phrase "Star Trek Lives!" was used on the flyers advertising the first convention in 1972 and was part of the Star Trek revival campaign undertaken by fans in the early 1970s.

The Individual Cons

Subpages for Star Trek Lives! (convention):

1972 · 1973 · 1974 · 1975 · 1976

Quick Guide to Titles and Dates

• In the summer of 1971, the committee organized a meeting in "Brooklyn Collage's Gershwin Auditorium, which could barely house the turnout."
• The International Star Trek Convention/Star Trek Lives! at the Statler Hilton Hotel, New York (January 21-23, 1972)
• The International Star Trek Convention at the Commodore Hotel. This was Leonard Nimoy's first convention appearance. (February 16-19, 1973)
• February 15-18, 1974 at the Americana Hotel, New York
• The Star Trek Convention at the Commodore Hotel, New York (February 14-17, 1975)
• The Star Trek Convention 1976 at the Commodore Hotel, New York (February 12-16, 1976)

The Name

For many years the event was simply referred to as "The Star Trek Convention" or the "Committee Con," the latter in reference to The Committee.

While Al Schuster was chair of The Committee (1972, 1973, 1974), it was also called the "International Star Trek Convention." Schuster took the name "International Star Trek Con" with him when he broke away to create Schuster Star Trek Conventions.

This con was also commonly referred to as FebCon.

As more conventions popped up in other cities and as the New York convention group split into two groups, the name "Star Trek Convention" became less unique. To avoid confusion with the overlapping names, "Star Trek Lives" has been selected for this article on Fanlore to refer to the series of New York Star Trek conventions before the split with Al Schuster.

Early, But, Not the Actual First

It is commonly believed that the 1972 convention was the very first Star Trek convention, but that honor goes to a smaller convention in 1969 held in Newark, New Jersey: Star Trek Con (1969 Star Trek con). However, the 1972 convention was the first convention that had guests.

Swag and Merchandising

Commemorative program books and other goods were sold by Tellurian Enterprises, Inc..

In the Planning: Late 1971

a flyer printed in The Nimoyan #3

From an early flyer:

Make all checks,and money orders payable to Albert Schuster. Please do not send any Klingon Koins.

Included in the program will be a talk on Mr. Spock by Dr. Isaac Asimov, and a discussion by members who have had the opportunity to visit the STAR TREK set, and watched the actual filming of the series. We have also approached several of the original cast and crew, and have invited them to attend. The regular program will include several slide shows. These will be based around various episodes of the show, as well as general information. Some of these have been presented in the past, and have been quite successful. We are still looking for additional items to include in the program. If you have a poem, story, essay, or idea which may apply, we would appreciate hearing of it. Please contact Devra Langsam ...

We are hoping to obtain a number of STAR TREK episodes which will be shown as part of a film program, with the generous cooperation of Paramount Pictures Corp. Other items will include a display of two uniform shirts, a phaser, and several of the original tribbles. There will be a fairly comprehensive fanzine display, including ones both currently available, and discontinued. Some of these will be on sale at the convention. Also on display will be pieces of STAR TREK, and related jewelry crafted by individuals. For additional information, please contact Elyse S. Pines...

The Art Show will be open to all areas of science fiction. The deadline for submission of material for display and/or sale is December 31, 1971.

All inquiries and material should be directed to Allan Asherman ...Please do not send us any material until you have contacted us first.

We are planning to have several industrial displays. We already have a tentative commitment from NASA to provide us with one. We are in the process of contacting severed, other companies in this regard. Any interested parties should contact Elyse S. Pines. All inquiries concerning any aspect of the program, displays, and the convention in general should be directed to Elyse S. Pines... All specific questions and comments pertaining to areas outlined above should be addressed to the committee member named.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the STAR TREK CONVENTION!

Descriptions

From a 1974 mainstream press article:

At the first New York based convention three years ago... the fans only totaled a paltry, by comparison, 2500. No one had counted on such a turn-out. Al Schuster, the organizer of the convention, and an entrepreneur, hadn't even originally planned on a "Star Trek" convention.

"I did it for ego," he said. "You see, three years back I bid on the World Science Fiction Convention. A number of people bid on it, and my bid was too low, so I lost. But to prove I could do it, I had a "Star Trek" convention. It was supposed to be perhaps two hundred and fifty people, and instead 2500 people came. Since then, I couldn't care less about the Sci-Fi conventions because this is bigger than that ever was.

The organizers of "Star Trek Lives!" anticipated only 500 attendees. When 3000 fans showed up, by the final day of the event registrars were issuing ID cards made from torn scraps of wrapping paper and some fans were let in for free: "We ran out of everything," Devra Langsam remembers. "We were cutting and sticking labels and pinning them on with straight pins."

"....[They] had expected about 500 to attend the convention. But, four hours before it was officially due to start, [Al Schuster] looked around at the mob scene on the 18th floor [of the Statler Hilton Hotel] and said, 'It's wild. We're going to have at least 3,000 people here. They're coming in from all over, Arizona, California, Canada. There's a whole busload from Toronto.'

undated photo of Gene Roddenberry addressing fans at a Star trek convention in the 1970s

An article in the Village Voice in 1972 describes the first convention:

"The convention was dreamed up and organized by three adult sci-fi freaks and show buffs, but it seemed to have been taken over completely by kids -- they manned most of the tables and did most of the trading. Few people over 16 were in sight, but there were plenty of 10- and even eight-year-olds lugging around huge suitcases crammed with treasured nuggets of Startrekia, and they approached the business at hand with the same circumspection that's evident at a big Parke-Bernet event. One pale, serious kid who looked about 11 approached another -- 'Aren't you that "Dark Shadows" freak?' 'Yeah. Got anything?' 'Some early glossies, to trade for Shatner shots only.' 'So, let's have a look."

In spite of what the outside world thought about fandom, fans were ecstatic to be gathering:

"The auditorium had seating for 500 - and 1500 crowded in to hear Roddenberry speak. Yet the event never got out of hand; Trek fans have a reputation for being well behaved, if exuberant, and this proved that it is one they deserve. The mood was exhilarating, and when Roddenberry spoke, the crowd exploded. Even he was surprised at the amount of love and appreciation for the series that the fans gave him. At one point, the fans even burst out chanting “Star Trek lives!” Suddenly it seemed possible that the series wasn’t dead after all."

One of the highlights of the convention was the fan built life size bridge of the Starship Enterprise. In his book "Star Trek: The Complete Unauthorized History", Robert Greenberger describes how fans disassembled the bridge, which was housed in update New York, and transported it down to Manhattan to be reassembled for the Committee conventions . Fans would photograph themselves on the bridge often wearing costumes.

The history of the convention was detailed in Joan Winston's 1977 essay So you want to have a "Star Trek" convention which was printed in the Starlog magazine. More history can be found in her New York Times Obituary in 2008. Others have blogged about the convention here and here.

Even though the 1972 convention netted the organizers only $92.36 each (after expenses) the organizers assembled for another, larger convention in 1973 and over 10,000 fans registered to attend. The Committee planned better in 1973, picking a larger hotel, The Commodore, and this second event was the first one that actors James Doohan and George Takei attended. Mr. Spock, aka Leonard Nimoy, made a surprise appearance - he happened to be in town - and was almost mobbed. One fan has blogged about his recollections of attending the 1973 convention here.

"The '74 con was too crowded - 10,000 to 14,000 attendees - the exact number is unknown as the Committee split off its Chairman after this one and the one who ran registration took the records with him. But, the crowding was so bad that Fire Marshalls became involved. The Committee was soon nicknamed The Coping Committee - they coped."

Photos from the 1974 convention convention are archived here and for the 1975 convention here.

Renaming, and a Split

In 1973, the convention was retitled to the "International Star Trek Convention." This name would move on with Al Schuster when he split with the rest of the Committee in 1975.

After Schuster's departure, the convention was held three more times in 1974, 1975 and 1976.

In a flyer advertising the 1974 con, Al Schuster addressed attendance and financials:

This annual event has grown tremendously. Convention attendance in 1973 was more than double that of 1972. In order to serve the thousands of fans who wish to express their devotion to Star Trek, we have booked one of the largest, and certainly one of the best, hotels in New York - the fabulous Americana. Room rates are $21.00 for singles and $29.00 for doubles. Additional beds are $7.00 per night. Room reservation cards will be mailed out 3 months prior to the convention.

Unfortunately, the large fee required to reserve this space, as well as other rising costs, necessitates raising advance convention membership to $4.00 as of June 20, 1973 to January 20, 1974. Convention membership will cost $7.00 after the latter date. The convention has not broken even for two years. We must make our expenses this year or face bankruptcy.

In 2017, Devra Langsam, one the con's founders, commented on Schuster's divergence:

After the fourth year, we split. Renee Bodner went with Al Schuster, and all the rest of us stayed together and put on the one last convention. We knew at that point, we knew that it was going to be the last one because with two other competing conventions, we knew we couldn’t keep on. Aside from the fact that people had developed other interests and were not willing to devote the enormous amount of time that it required.

[snipped]

It was a financial discussion. There was a lot uncomfortable feeling about it, but at the time, we were all very angry, but we worked it out. We managed. We did the one last convention, and then we stopped. Airing dirty linen from 45 years ago never works.

• 

  from Space-Time Continuum #5, 1974 statements by fans

The February 1975 convention returned to The Commodore Hotel with a new chairperson Devra Langsam under the name: "Star Trek Convention". Guests included William Shatner, Isaac Asimov, Majel Barrett, Hal Clement, David Gerrold, Devra Lansing, Gene Roddenberry, George Takei, and Bill Theiss, costume designer who brought with him costumes that he had fans model. This convention "was also crowded, more so because some sneaky kids teamed with a dishonest printer to sell counterfeit tickets."" Al Shuster, the former "Committee" chair put on his own Star Trek convention a month earlier under the name "The International Star Trek Convention" at the Statler Hilton after having a falling out in 1974 with the original organizers which led to at least one lawsuit. Al Schuster was able to secure William Shatner's attendance even though the 1975 Star Trek Convention had booked him to appear at their event one month later. Luckily, both events did well.

The February 1976 convention was the last organized by 'The Committee' and opened at the Commodore Hotel under Thom Anderson as chairman. Over 5,000 fans attended and the overflow had to be turned away. The Committee event faced stiff local competition with Al Schuster's International Star Trek Convention taking place in mid January 1976 and Lisa Boyton's highly commercial event only two weeks later.

undated composite photo of a Star trek convention in the 1970s

Also by 1976, the 10th anniversary of the airing of the show, many more conventions began appearing across the country. And, that year, Al Shuster put on his own 10th Anniversary convention held at - yes again - the Statler hotel in New York. Another fan led group, Tristar Industries based on Staten Island, sprang up and continued hosting Star Trek conventions in New York. They continued organizing conventions until 1982 when commercially run, for-profit conventions began taking over:

"The price of hotel space skyrocketed to the point many organizers couldn't afford "big city" hotels space anymore. Also, after 1979 and STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE, Trek became "hot" property again and Paramount Pictures, wanted a piece of the action in terms of licensing the very name "Star Trek" to a convention-which became an expensive proposition. Also, major "A" list guests started wanting astronomical fees for their appearances at such events, and many also declined going to them....it was around 1982, that Creation Conventions actually made a somewhat exclusive deal with Paramount to hold "Star Trek" conventions, much to the chagrin of the smaller local conventions which were being told by lawyers to no longer use "Star Trek" in their promotions or convention names. Creation went onto well into the 80's and 90's securing many if not all of the biggest names in all of the varying "Star Trek" series."

In 1976, Gene Roddenberry commented on the "Star Trek Lives!," similar cons, and of profit:

SS: What kind of money is being transacted here at these conventions?

GR: I understand that quite a lot of money has been made at the conventions. At Equicon, however, and the February "Committee" Convention, really with the amount of money that group who puts them on make, they could have done much better going out door-to-door to sell vacuum cleaners during the same amount of time it took them to put the whole thing together.

Comments by Devra Langsam: 2016

In 2016, Devra Langsam said:

The fact that the conventions grew bigger and bigger was shocking. We had about fifteen people working on the Committee, of whom only five actually did most of the work. That's the way that goes—we had help from a friend who had access to a real computer, so we were able to computerize our mailing list long before anybody besides big companies ever dreamed of that, and we sent out a progress report, which is what the Worldcons do, saying, "Hey, look at this. We've invited this person to come, and he says he's going to come." We didn't say how much we had to pay him. The first convention was such a success, in terms of reaching people, that when we started to do the second one, we got a lot of people coming back. So it was like you had three weeks off and then you started all over again for the following year's convention.

Comments by Devra Langsam: 2017

In 2017, Langsam said:

Elyse Pines and I were in one of our homes, looking through out slide collection, because I was going to do a slide presentation at the library to amuse the kids, and I wanted good shots of this and that. I had a poem that we were illustrating so we wanted to get good pictures that matched the poem, and we were going through hundreds and hundreds and thousands of slides in little cardboard folders, and one of us says to the other, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a convention like LunaCon that was only about Star Trek so we invite all of our friends, and we can talk about Star Trek, and nobody would look at us funny and say, “That’s not real science fiction,” or “Why aren’t you talking about Asimov?” And I said, “Well, yeah, that would be nice.” That was on the weekend, and on the following Thursday, Elyse called me and said, “We’ve got a printer and a hotel and everything,” and it just sort of grew from there.

We got Joan Winston who was working for one of the networks in a secretarial position. We got Allan Asherman who was an artist, who was supposed to do the art show. We got Hal Clement to come and give a science talk. Hal liked Star Trek a lot. He was a professional author, a well-known and respected professional author. He was also an artist, and he was a science teacher. The man was a real triple threat person, and we got Isaac Asimov to come down and do a talk, and Joan contacted NASA and got us a real space ship, a real spacesuit, and a big exhibit with panels, showing different things about it, and we got Roddenberry. I don’t remember whether he brought the films that we showed, or whether they just came from Paramount, but we got actual film copies of the episodes, including the blooper reels, which I think that was the first place it was ever shown. And we got Phil Seuling who was a comic book seller to run the dealers room. He contacted people who had Star Trek stuff to sell. I think they must have been comics, hand-made phasers, and that kind of stuff.

So we modeled it basically after the other conventions we knew, which were the science fiction conventions, so we had an art show, a dealers room, and a costume ball, and Linda Deneroff did a trivia contest, full of unspeakable questions I couldn’t answer because they were so tiny and specific, and had Al Schuster, and he was a professional printer, and he did the pocket program. And, as I said, at that time, it was very hard to get good pictures of the show, so we went through our slides, and he printed up a book that was entirely pictures from slides. There were the actors and some of the good shots from episodes. That was, of course, part of your loot when you became a convention member. You got the trivia questionnaire. You got the copy of the schedule. You got this beautiful book with a full-color cover, and you got a bumper sticker that said “Star Trek Lives.” I think we must have gotten those from Roddenberry.

And, so we did it. We rented the top floor of the Statler Hilton, which is currently the Hotel Pennsylvania, opposite Penn Station. It was rated for 1800 people. I think we had 32-3,400 people in there. We don’t know because on the last day, we stopped taking money at about 1:00 in the afternoon. We just said, “Write your name down and your address and put it in this box,” and somebody stole the box, so we don’t really know, but we had told all of our friends [inaudible] Lewis. “So you want to come to our convention.” “Yes!” Well, it so much in advance, and we had 800 advance registrations. I don’t remember who did the registration at the moment, but anyway, we thought probably the attendance would double because that’s what LunaCon usually did, so that we prepared for 2000, and we got somewhere between 32-3400 people. Just lucky that the Fire Marshall didn’t come because he would have closed us down in a heartbeat.

And, afterward, we said, “Oh, this was wonderful! Let’s do it again!” Very stupid, but we did. We did it four more times.

A the end of the fourth convention, we had a big fight with Al Schuster, and we decided to split up, so he did his own convention the last year, and also a person named Sandra Boynton [ed: Lisa Boynton], no relationship to the artist, did a convention, so there were three Star Trek conventions in New York City within three months. We still had 6000 people, and the second year we hired convention ladies to handle registration. That was a mercy. Wow.

The first year, the actors came for nothing. After that, their agents said to them, “This is your job. You must get paid for it.” So, gradually, we started paying them, and what they wanted became bigger and bigger, and eventually, we were priced out of the market. We couldn’t handle it. We learned to print over what we thought we would get. We learned to have security guards so the actors were not overwhelmed by fans. Umm, we had enormous, long committee meetings where we screamed at each other, and then we all went and did the work anyway. We had parties where people came and stuck labels onto forthcoming convention booklets that we mailed out, and you had to sort them by zip code. This was—you could get it printed by the computer, but the computer wouldn’t sort it by zip code. You had to do that by hand. Arg. To be on the floor of Elyse’s house, surrounded by piles of stuff, sorting them into all the same zip code, the same first three, bundle it, put a label on it. That was a lot of work.

And in the end, I think people had a pretty good time, but in the end, it was getting to the point where it was more work for us and less fun, and people were getting interested in other things, and it was too much work to be a hobby and too little money to be a job. There were 15 of us, and the amount of money we made, if you count all the hours I spent going through the mail and typing things into the computer, and all the hours that Joyce spent writing out registrations and stamping them with invisible ink and all the hours we spent stuffing the freebies, it was like five cents an hour. (laugh) Really not much money, and as I say, it wasn’t fun anymore. We had a good run, though. We did it

[The actors] came to our first convention, and I think we may have given them hotel rooms. After that, we started paying them a speaker’s fee and hotel room, and eventually, someone like Mr. Shatner would get his hotel room, a per diem, first-class airplane ticket, a limo to pick him up at the airport, and really, it just became uneconomical. There is kind of a catch-22 in this. If you want to have a big-name guest, you have to have a lot of money. You have to have a lot of attendees. If you have a lot of attendees, you need a large hotel room, a large hotel space, which is expensive, so you have to have a lot of attendees to pay for the hotel, to pay for the guests, and if you don’t, then you’re going to be in a bad way. So, you see what I mean? It just goes around and around and around, and you’re stuck. It comes down to that, yeah. We were a corporation, but we were supporting the corporation in some ways. At one point, I put up money for the hotel deposit because we just didn’t have it, because every year the money was just fed back into the next convention, and we just didn’t have it.

At least [the actors must not have] hated it terribly because they kept on doing it, but um, I don’t know whether they enjoyed it. I really don’t. The first year, I think they were just overwhelmed that people were still interested in this show that they had done, that had been off the air for several years. It never was that popular in the Nielsen ratings, and they just couldn’t believe that there was so much interest, and that people had memorized all the dialogue, and I think that they were very pleased by it, but after a while, I think, after they done several conventions and other conventions in different parts of the country, it got to be sort of, “Well, this is just another gig.”

One year we had a song contest. We had a production of “H.M.S. Trek-A-Star,” which was done by a Dover High School group, and they were very good. We got them hotel rooms, and we paid for their costumes, and they came up and did the show. Before the show came on, we had a song contest, which had lots of entries. I don’t remember who played the piano and sang them, but some of them were very funny.... we didn’t have a lot of filk. At that point, filk, I think, was in straight science fiction. People were probably writing it, but we were not, it wasn’t part of the convention except for that one song contest. I think we printed the words of the winning songs and put them into the goodie bag, but I don’t remember entirely.

There was a costume ball. People came and presented their stuff, and there were some really, really good costumes. Amazing. Some people were just great copies of things that had been on the show, and some people — one person, I think it was Fern Marder — came as one of those spore plants from the episode where Spock falls in love. She came in, in this plant outfit. She stood on stage and she spat out a mouthful of confetti kind of stuff to imitate the plant throwing its spores at people. There was a boy, a young boy in a wheelchair, and his parents made him up as Captain Pike after he had been injured. That was tremendously effective. Then there were a million Mr. Spocks, and some of them were really, really not very well done, but that was—And we had a number of the actors as judges of the costumes, and I think that some of them were very fair, and some of them just were not, but...

[snipped]

There was a lady named Monica Miller who specialized in Vulcans, and she made ear tips that fastened on like an earring. She slid them over her ear and would squeeze them on at the bottom, and then she did the outfit, and she did ancient Vulcan priestesses. She was a very slender woman so she got away with somewhat revealing garments. They were really excellent designs. She was also an artist.

Nancy Kippax Remembers

Nancy Kippax has blogged extensively about her experiences at the series of New York conventions:

• Reminisce With Me/Conventions
• The Big New York Cons, Part I
• The Big New York Cons, Part II

Shirley Maiewski Remembers

From a 2000 letter to the Canadian zine Trexperts, Shirley Maiewski says:

It is hard to believe that it has been twenty-eight years since the very first all STAR TREK convention was held!... Since then there have been literally hundreds of them, all over the world. I was fortunate to have been one of those who went to that first one... The con, as they have been known ever since, was held on the top floor of the hotel— eighteen stories up. The Committee thought there might be about 800 people attend, but when they stopped counting on Sunday afternoon, there were over three thousand! And they realized they had something! Yes, it was crowded! The guests at the con were Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, D.C. Fontana, Bjo Trimble, Richard Arnold and an exhibition of NASA material... Others there were sci-fi writers Isaac Asimov and Hal Clement— both STAR TREK fans. One of the main attractions was the Dealers' Room, where one could buy all kinds of Trek mementos. One of the tables was run by Bjo Trimble. I had corresponded with her a couple of times and was so pleased to actually meet her at last. You may remember that Bjo was the one who started the letter-writing campaign that saved STAR TREK after its second season. I went up and introduced myself to her and before I knew it, I was helping her run her table! That's how things go at cons! Later on, Bjo closed her table and we went walking through a hall, when Bjo said, "There's Isaac Asimov. Want to meet him?" Of course I did and she introduced me to him. I had read his books for years and it was a great thrill to meet him. Not only meet him, but get kissed as well! Seems he always kissed ladies when he met them. Back to the con— D.C. Fontana gave a talk on how it was to write for the show and answered questions. One question asked was "What does the T stand for in Kirk's name?" That was never explained in the original series, you know. Dorothy came right back with "TIBERIUS!" Seems it was a nickname they used for Shatner on the set! Now you know! Another first at that con was the showing of the Blooper Reel— the out-takes from the shows. They played to a packed house, and you could not hear a line of dialog because of the screams of laughter!... The great thing about conventions is that you meet so many great people! ... Times have changed, of course— prices for one thing. As I recall, our room at the hotel cost something like $27 a night that time. The last con I went to in New York about three years ago I had to pay $127 a night! The tickets for that first con cost i3S0> Nowadays they can run almost $100 if you want reserved seats. I seldom go anymore, Much as I'd like to, unless they are close to home. I do recommend them, however, go if you can! You will have fun.

Attempts at Replacement

The cessation of "Star Trek Lives!" and Equicon created a hole in many fans' lives, and they either turned to the Schuster Star Trek Conventions, quit going to cons, turned towards smaller regional cons, or, in the case of the chair of August Party, attempted to created a new series of Star Trek cons. From a January 1978 appeal:

From Kolker's description in Ambrov Zeor #6 (January 1978):

Every year, science fiction fandom holds a World Science Fiction Convention. The site and committee for these conventions are picked by the fans themselves from among bids submitted by various groups in different cities. No matter how many other conventions are held through the year, this is the one central gathering for fans of science fiction and fantasy.

There is no such gathering in STAR TREK fandom. In past years, fans east of the Mississippi routinely went to The Convention in New York while those west went to Equicon, but neither of those early conventions exist any more.

Moreover large conventions have become almost the exclusive preserve of large commercial outfits, not connected to fandom other than in the fact they make money from it.

Therefore I propose that fandom begin working on plans to take control of at least one convention back into its own hands. That we begin work on the World Star Trek Convention.

Although details, of course, have to be ironed out, Washington's Birthday weekend has a certain amount of connection with fannish tradition and should be ideal for the convention.

Articles, Meta, Further Reading

Caption for this negative and mocking 1976 article from the UK paper, "The Guardian," "Trekkie with antennae; embarrassing to the SF straights," an example of the worst of mundane and fansplaining reporting about fans. The article mentions the "Star Trek Lives!" cons.

• Fantasy Boom: The Profits Are Real, ^{Archived version} by Paul Grimes, "New York Times" (May 30, 1976)
• So you want to have a "Star Trek" convention, by Joan Winston (January 1977)
• Memory Alpha Wiki's entry on the convention
• Joan Winston: Recollections and Tributes which discusses the convention
• Star Trek Lives! Star Trek convention timeline with photos
• Newsweek's Collection of Photos from Star Trek conventions in the 1970s
• clipping from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, February 29, 1976
• Star Trek Conventions in the Seventies posted on April 15, 2010 at the Base of Galactic forum (many photos)
• Fanac's TrekCon Photo Album - Master Index (history and photos)
• 'Star Trek' fans eye convention by David George, The C-W ?? 1973 (University of Alabama student newspaper)
• New York's Star Trek convention shows it's never been cooler to be a fan, ^{Archived version}, article about Star Trek: Mission New York con, includes recollections and photos of the "Star Trek Lives!" organizers (2016)
• The Early Days of Star Trek Conventions, ^{Archived version}, Robert Greenberger, unknown date
• Episode 71: Women of the First Conventions – Women at Warp, ^{Archived version} (2017)
• "Star Trek" enthusiasts also defined modern fanfiction and fan culture. Photo - Women who love ‘Star Trek’ are the reason that modern fandom exists, ^{Archived version} (2017)